For one week only, escape the heat and humidity with big discounts on titles that will entertain you all summer long. Check out the full list of PS3 games that are part of this year’s PSN Summer Sale:

• Back to the Future: The Game – Full Series (Sale price $13.99; Plus price $9.79; Regular price $19.99)
• Chime Super Deluxe (Sale price $6.99; Plus price $4.89; Regular price $9.99)
• Dead Space Extraction (Sale price $10.49; Plus price $7.34; Regular price $14.99)
• Hard Corps: Uprising (Sale price $10.49; Plus price $7.34; Regular price $14.99)
• Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (Sale price $6.99; Plus price $4.89; Regular price $9.99)
• PixelJunk Shooter 2 (Sale price $6.99; Plus price $4.89; Regular price $9.99)
• Risk: Factions (Sale price $6.99; Plus price $4.89; Regular price $9.99)
• Shank (Sale price $6.99; Plus price $4.89; Regular price $9.99)
• Scott Pilgrim (Sale price $6.99; Plus price $4.89; Regular price $9.99)
• Swarm (Sale price $6.99; Plus price $4.89; Regular price $9.99) (Sale price $10.49; Plus price
  $7.34; Regular price $14.99)
• Tales from Space: About a Blob (Sale price $10.49; Plus price $7.34; Regular price $14.99)

Don’t hesitate because this limited-time offer melts on July 19th, and the games will return to full price. Head on over to the PlayStation Store on Tuesday and take advantage of this season’s best deals!

Over the last few days, we’ve been announcing the Shank Costumes over at the official Shank blog, and divulging how to unlock them on our Twitter account.

Jeff asked if I could divulge one unlock criteria especially for PlayStation.Blog readers, so obviously I complied. The costume I chose was one that’s close to impossible to stumble across.

So, today’s special is costume number 8 — the ANY-S costume!

Unlock Criteria

After completing the single-player campaign, input a slight modification to the classic Konami code: up+up+down+down+left+right+left+right+circle+x.

As you can guess, these outfits are odes to our own geeky fantasies. Naming them was a fun little exercise. Did you know that “Droid” is trademarked? I didn’t.

And with that, I’m off! Enjoy the launch trailer and let me know if you have any questions! As usual, I’ll lurk in these forums as well as the official Facebook page.

This edition features Scott Pilgrim, Shank, ‘Marvel-ous LittleBigPlanet’ add-ons, along with the Top 10 Avatars available. There’s also the new Top Gun game which made the PULSE crew want to rent this 80′s action classic (which by the way is currently available for rental or purchase on the video side of PlayStation Store.)

Thanks for downloading and watching.

Recently, I decided to have a little fun with the game and record some of the combos we came up with using the standard-issued weapons. Below is the result: a vignette of Shank wailing on a poor dude. Keeping your enemies tied up in combos, grappling enemies to deal additional damage, and using moves such as the pounce-shotgun tactic to keep enemies at bay become increasingly important in Shank as enemies become progressively smarter — especially in Hard Mode.

If you look really hard, you’ll notice a couple moments are briefly pixelated (pixel-censorship gives me the chuckles) due to this being a public video and the ratings boards saying “tsk tsk.” Don’t worry, the actual game is in all its uncensored glory.

Also: lots of people have been asking us about the score of Shank — we’ve released the first track on our Facebook page, and we asked people to help hit our goal of 1500 fans before releasing the whole soundtrack to our fans. We did that in three hours (thanks!) and the soundtrack is now being remastered for everyone to enjoy.

Come check out our Shank Facebook page! I’m usually lurking around there a few times a day to answer questions. Note that you have to sign in to Facebook to see the page, because it’s age-gated.

When Shank was shown at PAX 2009, there were two questions that I couldn’t answer which came up over and over again. The first was, “What platform is it coming out on?” The second “is there going to be co-op?”

I answered the first question, with my own question. I stuffed our dev kit into a ghetto cardboard box, labeled with a large question-mark and strung a handful of controllers (including Atari and Dreamcast ones) from underneath it for added effect. At the time, nobody had played Shank, and I didn’t have platform approval yet. Thankfully, the gaming community and our fans spoke up, and I got my wish — we were able to negotiate a deal to bring the game to the PlayStation Network.

The second, co-op question – proved to be much trickier.

On one hand, we felt strongly about the classic, couch-play beat-em-up genre; very much like Double Dragon – which is an awesome experience and one of our main influences – but, on the other hand, our single player campaign was something special and truly unique. Every camera is hand-crafted, ever scene and enemy is carefully placed, achieving our vision of the “cinematic brawler.” Moving or shifting one piece of the single-player puzzle, could easily spell disaster.

Having two players in our orchestrated brawler tossed a huge wrench into our development plan. It’s challenging to keep both players on screen, so we can’t be sure how wide the camera will go. We also need enough enemies to keep both players busy, but the added chaos – while fun – introduces a different experience altogether. To make matters worse, building bosses that required two players, served no guarantee that the other player would be around to help. What we definitely didn’t want was to have a lame-o, tacked-on feature that just wasn’t very fun for the second player.

So we bit the bullet.

We said, “we’re going to make a whole bonus co-op campaign, and in each separate campaign, we’re going to play to their strengths.” The solution was to design the single player experience to be far more cinematic, allowing you to really enjoy and savor each action packed moment. We then kept the co-op rooted to the good ol’ fashioned beat-em-up formula that encourages players to help each other, especially during our though boss battles – which we went back and designed specific boss battles that can only be won with a second player at hand. As a finishing touch, we used the co-op campaign to delve even deeper into each character and foe that will eventually mess Shank over, leading up to the events in his story.

At the end, it presented a long list of challenges and obstacles, but it proved to be well worth it when trying to achieve our unique vision that is Shank and it’s co-op experience.